Self-awareness, Empathy and Evolution
A study recently published by Helmut Prior and his associates of the Institute of Psychology at Goethe University in Frankfurt has demonstrated that magpies also demonstrate this capacity. This has important implications for evolutionary theory, as mammalian and avian brains are completely different and have developed along different evolutionary lines; it would appear that the capacity for self-awareness has developed twice. | Psychology Today Blogs
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Saturday, August 23, 2008
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Like Marx and Freud, the other towering nineteenth-century humanists whose names are dropped in the same breath as his, he embedded in our world view fundamental concepts that once embraced will not let go. But unlike the variants of Marxist and Freudian thought that have launched a thousand experiments (not all seaworthy), evolution is accepted as fact, not theory, at least as far as biology is concerned. And with biology brought to heel, evolutionists have been hard at work figuring out how and why humans behave and think the way they do, both as individuals and as societies. ? By Mark Czarnecki
Friday, August 15, 2008
Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution
Hawks J, Wang E. T., Cochran G. M., Harpending H. C., and Moyzis R. K., Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution, PNAS (early online) doi:10.1073/pnas.0707650104
Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of the Human Mind
Subtle refinements in brain architecture, rather than large-scale alterations, make us smarter than other animals. (Scientific American)
Let us suppose that the laboratories of Marvin Minsky and Rodney Brooks get funded well into the middle of the next century. Each succeeds spectacularly at its stated goal, and completely stays off the other's turf. The Splintered Mind
From Crackle:
Thursday, August 14, 2008
The Ratbot: Researchers unveil first robot with "biological brain"
"Robot technology has been making steady advances in recent years, but the announcement today of a robot with a rat brain seems to be a game-changer. " - The Ampersand
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Scientists and Magicians Describe How Tricks Exploit Glitches in Perception
"In a paper published last week in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, a team of brain scientists and prominent magicians described how magic tricks, both simple and spectacular, take advantage of glitches in how the brain constructs a model of the outside world from moment to moment, or what we think of as objective reality." NYTimes.com
Sunday, August 10, 2008
"New research is linking dopamine to complex social phenomena and changing neuroscience in the process." (Seed)
- The importance of dopamine was discovered by accident. In 1954 James Olds and Peter Milner
- At first the dopamine neurons didn?t fire until the juice was delivered; they were responding to the actual reward. However, once the animal learned that the tone preceded the arrival of juice ? this requires only a few trials ? the same neurons began firing at the sound of the tone instead of the sweet reward. And then eventually, if the tone kept on predicting the juice, the cells went silent. They stopped firing altogether.
- The software makes predictions about what will happen ? about how a checkers game will unfold for example ? and then compares these predictions with what actually happens. If the prediction is right, that series of predictions gets reinforced. However, if the prediction is wrong, the software reevaluates its representation of the game.
- The crucial feature of these dopamine neurons, say Montague and Dayan, is that they are more concerned with predicting rewards than with the rewards themselves. Once the cells memorize the simple pattern ? a loud tone predicts the arrival of juice ? they become exquisitely sensitive to variations on the pattern. If the cellular predictions proved correct and the primates experienced a surge of dopamine, the prediction was reinforced. However, if the pattern was violated ? if the tone sounded but the juice never arrived ? then the monkey?s dopamine neurons abruptly decreased their firing rate. This is known as the ?prediction error signal.? The monkey got upset because its predictions of juice were wrong.
- According to Montague, the reason abstract thoughts can be so rewarding, is that the brain relies on a common neural currency for evaluating alternatives. ?It?s clear that you need some way to compare your options, even if your options come from very different categories,? he says. By representing everything in terms of neuron firing rates, the human brain is able to choose the abstract thought over the visceral reward, as long as the abstraction excites our cells more than apple juice. That?s what makes ideas so powerful: No matter how esoteric or ethereal they get, they are ultimately fed back into the same system that makes us want sex and sugar
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Lambros Malafouris | Extended Mind
"The mainstream approach to cognition holds that it happens in the mind and that material culture is nothing more than an outgrowth of our mental capacities. Archaeologist Lambros Malafouris is challenging this deep-seated idea with a radical new notion: the hypothesis of extended mind, which posits that material culture is not a reflection of the human mind but an actual part of it." Seedmagazine.com | Revolutionary Minds | The Re-envisionaries |
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Decision Making in the Brain: Eavesdropping on Neurons
The interactions of neurons reveal that connections are critical in how we decide. By John Pearson and Michael Platt, Scientific American
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